A Meditation On Wallets, Lost Or Otherwise

I did something uncharacteristically honest and selfless yesterday. Instead of bumping someone off or shoplifting the latest crime novel from my local bookstore, I returned a man's wallet. I found it in a ground floor men's room in the building where I toil at my ignominious day job. There it was, worn, leathery and very fatly stuffed, perched on the industrial-sized toilet paper dispenser in the largest of the stalls. At first I simply stared at it. After all, I had my own business to take care of. As I sat there, I pondered what to do. Should I leave it there? Maybe the dude who lost it would remember where it was and come back for it. Or maybe somebody else would find it and (I assume) turn it in - or steal it. I didn't really care. At least not initially. I didn't want to touch it - for two reasons. One, if I emerged from the men's room with this alien wallet in hand, someone - perhaps even its owner - might see me, and I would be accused of stealing it before I even had the chance to return it. Two, handling anything some other guy left in a men's room stall could be very unsanitary - for its owner as well as for me. Having seen Contagion the night before at the local Showcase Cinema, I was feeling a little queasy about the possibilities out there for, well, contagion. The leathery skin of that wallet did not look healthy.

Eventually, I did the "right" thing. Sort of. As soon as I was done with my business - but before I washed my hands (after all, I need to retain some portion of sociopathic mischief in everything I do) - I lifted the wallet with pincered fingers. I extracted something from it. No - not money! I pulled out the dude's ID card to see who he was. Ah, a name to go with the lost article! Would I steal his identity? No. Could I have stolen his identity? Interesting thought, but no - probably not easily. After I washed my hands, I conveyed this well-worn and somewhat turd-like locus of a man's identity to the nearest authority - but not before searching the name plates on every office door to see if the dude worked nearby. Somewhat to my relief, he did not.

Oddly, I did not consider theft - or any other sort of crime. Am I losing my touch? Have I gone timid? Or has Empathy insinuated herself, like the womanly entity she is, into the bedroom of my soul?

When I was very young and, like many a city boy, did not yet possess a driver's license, I carried no identification on me. Just some cash, and not always that. I bar-hopped, caroused, got into fights, puts the moves on girls, darted in and out amongst cars driven by drunken persons, and pursued all manner of hair-raising capers, all without an ID. Now I obey the laws religiously (mostly), and carry innumerable small labels on myself as though I expect to drop dead or be run over any moment. And it is not just death I fear. It is the police, the concierges of corporate towers, even the T.S.A. at my hometown MBTA station - they, too, would ream my ass if I ever attempted to pass before them ID-less. It sometimes seems to me that our ability to move freely through life and do that American thing of constantly reinventing ourselves has been eroded by carrying around too much identification. If anyone who wants to can always pin me down as exactly who or what I currently am, how can I aspire to become anything else?

I've lost wallets myself, and I know it feels. Believe me! You feel like you've lost your license to exist. I lost my wallet once when I was a tourist in Denmark, but someone found it and brought it to the police station. (The Vikings, too, have faded into civility.) I lost it another time when a hooker picked my pocket in Times Square. I even thought I'd lost it once when I had to go pick up my in-laws at South Station, and had stopped into a bar beforehand to steady my nerves. I ended up cancelling my credit card, only to find out a day or two later that I had, in my distraction, left it in my overcoat when I brought my in-laws home.

Oh, yes. Wallets. ID's. The insidious conflation of money with identity that wallets enable. What a thing it would be to be able to go without wallets! If I were run over, I might end up as a John Doe in the city morgue. Even if I survived, no doctor would treat me because I would have no health benefits card. But on the other hand, to go without a wallet might render me unmuggable. Should I choose to commit a crime myself, it wouldn't exactly make me unarrestable - but it would make it nearly impossible for the cops to find me again if I escaped. Going wallet-less wouldn't be as drastic as going naked, but who knows what kinds of freedom it could give us and what thrills it might induce?

Radical Brighton Bank Robbers From The Age Of Aquarius

This is a real blast from the past - indeed, from the days when leftism still existed in the United States, when it roamed the mod streets of Boston like a herd of bison. In September 23, 1970, two Brandeis students, Susan Saxe and Katherine Power, and three ex-convicts - William Gilday, Stanley Ray Bond and Robert Valeri - "entered the State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston with the intent to expropriate funds to help finance the movement against the Vietnam War." Sadly, for them, they netted less than $27,000. Even adjusting for inflation, this was a paltry sum for such a serious crime. But then again seventies lefties were never noted for their soaring financial acumen. Far and away the worst consequence of their crime was their murder of 42-year old Boston police officer, William Schroeder. Killing a cop is never a good career move, but this action was especially horrifying for at least three reasons: 1) They shot him in the back, 2) they shot him with a Thompson submachine gun, and 3) Schroeder left behind nine kids.

This event alone mobilized the Boston police to hunt them down, but the Brighton robbery had not been their first serious felony in the name of radicalism. September 1970 had been something of a spree month for the gang. They had "expropriated funds" from Bell Federal Savings and Loan in Philadelphia on September 1st, and on September 20th they broke into the National Guard Armory in Newburyport, Massachusetts, stole some ordnance, and then attempted to blow the place up. These were serious radicals indeed.

Most of the ink devoted to this case in the past has been spilled on Susan Saxe and Katherine Power. Saxe was apprehended in 1975, but Katherine Power was not apprehended until 1993, when the former high school valedictorian was working as a restaurant owner, cooking teacher and food writer in Oregon. Having become depressed by her terrorist past, Power outed herself to her Oregon social circle and eventually surrendered to the FBI. Saxe was sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison, and Power served only six years. Both women compel our fascination as "nice girls" - bespectacled super-student type "nice girls" no less - gone horribly bad.

However, the guys I'm curious about are the ex-cons, at least two of which were Massachusetts natives. The youngest was Robert Valeri, only 21 at the time. He was also the first apprehended. Identified by bank surveillance photographs, he was arrested at his Somerville home and quickly gave up his compatriots, fingering both Gilday and Bond. Gilday was apprehended on September 28th after an hour-long highway pursuit that reputedly involved "about 100 police cars". Although Gilday never managed to escape Massachusetts, Bond got all the way out to Grand Junction, Colorado before he was arrested while boarding a plane. One wonders if he had a D.B. Cooper-type scheme in mind.

Both William Gilday, 41, and Stanley Bond, 26, were clever men with rather interesting back stories. A native of Amesbury, Mass., Gilday had once been a minor league pitcher for a Washington Senators farm team, where he was known as "Lefty Gilday". (I know. Lefty? Washington Senators? You can't make this stuff up.) In his thirties he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to Walpole State Prison. It was there that he, Valeri and Stanley Bond enrolled in a rehabilitation program called STEP (short for Student Tutor Education Program). He and Valeri began taking courses at Northeastern, while Bond - himself a former Vietnam War helicopter pilot and perhaps the smartest of the trio - attended Brandeis University in Waltham. Brandeis was infested with radicalism at that time, and it was here that Bond connected with Saxe and Power, both members of a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society called the Weather Underground. Bond began an affair with Power (who, after her capture in '93, gave lukewarm reviews to the sex). Cocksman or not, Bond was allegedly brilliant and charismatic and was able to unite the interests of the ex-cons and the coeds.

Both Gilday and Bond spent the rest of their lives in prison. Gilday, who developed a reputation as a "jail house lawyer extraordinaire", recently died at the MCI in Shirley, Mass. at the age of 82 - prematurely, according to his die-hard radical admirers, as his parents lived to 99 and 102, respectively. Bond died in 1972, while making a bomb to help himself escape from Walpole, pretty much blowing off his head and his hands.

Ah, those were the days! The days when youngish white criminals could still have some sexy radical cachet, and were not yet the shambling illiterate proles or the tattooed and shaven-headed Aryan Brotherhood types of more recent times. It is questionable whether or not these guys actually saw themselves as warriors for a more equitable society, or were simply co-opting radical politics to serve their own sociopathic delusions of grandeur. I'm inclined to believe the latter. Although homegrown terrorism has waned in recent years, having apparently been "outsourced" to more foreign populations, I can see a certain continuity between gun-toting smart cons like Gilday and Bond and other varieties of "smart guys gone wrong" that have been a staple of Boston area criminality for decades.

Crime: The Radical Bank Job (Time)
William Gilday and the Brighton Bank Heist, 1970 (Boston Local TV News Project)
William Gilday (Denver Anarchist Black Cross)
Political Prisoner William 'Lefty' Gilday passes away (Google Groups)
Stanley Ray Bond (Wikipedia)
Katherine Ann Power (Wikipedia)
Last words on the Weather Underground (Media Nation)
Susan Saxe Pleads Guilty; Receives 10-12 Year Sentence (Harvard Crimson)

The Murder Of Debra Davis (And Other Whitey Bulger Atrocities)

More Whitey news! I provide some links below to articles about the eagerness of Whitey Bulger victims (or their survivors) to strike back any way they can. In 2009, a federal court ruled that "$350,000 to the families of each of the three victims, because of the conscious pain and suffering endured by Debra Davis, 26, who was strangled in 1981; Deborah Hussey, 26, strangled in 1985; and Louis Litif, 45, who was stabbed and shot in 1980." Davis and Hussey are among at least two women strangled by Whitey Bulger. On separate occasions. It almost makes you wonder why on earth Whitey was not investigated as a possible Boston Strangler suspect, back in the day. And keep in mind that becoming Boston Strangler II was just one of his sidelines. The middle-aged Litif was a South Boston bookmaker who was about to provide evidence about Whitey before he was killed. The judge awarded an additional $800,000 to his widow and two children. The losing defendant in this civil case was not just the government, but specifically the FBI, who protected Whitey from local authorities while he acted as their informant. But winning a lawsuit against them is not enough, say many. They want everyone in the FBI involved with the Whitey Bulger protection scam to be exposed and prosecuted - not just their fall guy, John Connolly.

Debra Davis was Steve Flemmi's longtime girlfriend, having met the middle-aged thug as a teenager. After nine years she wanted out, but Flemmi passive-aggressively lured the poor woman to a South Boston address where Whitey (not Steve, you notice) strangled her with his bare hands, and then extracted her teeth with a pair of pliers. Kevin Weeks, who is now something of a minor celebrity and definitely not in jail, helped Whitey bury the body in Quincy. Of all Whitey's black-hearted shenanigans, I find this the most chilling. When Whitey was not killing women, he was killing their kin - even those of his mistress, Catherine Grieg. He not only killed her brother-in-law, Paul McGonagle, but may also have killed her brother, David. David Greig supposedly committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. Relevant factoid - Whitey "discovered" the body. You can reach your own conclusions there.

Now that Whitey has been apprehended and sits in jail awaiting justice, lots of former friends, enemies and/or fre-nemies have come out of the woodwork to give their blessings, so to speak.

Here are some samples of how fondly Whitey is remembered and how well he is loved:

Patrick Nee, a former member of the Mullen Gang who once had a running gun battle with Whitey: "I wish I’d killed Whitey Bulger when I had the opportunity."

Richard Marinick, the author and a onetime armored-car-robber, was once threatened by Whitey - and rather disgustingly at that: "I’m walking along the street in Southie one day, and Bulger’s car pulls up. He says, ‘Get in.’ I’m sitting in the back seat, face to face with Jimmy. He says, ‘You’re a health nut, right, a healthy guy?’ Bulger was into good health, eating right, taking vitamin supplements; we’d talked about it before. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what you’re doing now is not very healthy.’ He explained to me, ‘Our primary line of business is racketeering. Our secondary line of business is killing people. You do not want to be part of our secondary line of business … I will kill you and run your body through the meat-grinding plant. I will grind up your body, put it in a plastic bag, and leave it on your mother’s doorstep.’"

Kevin Weeks, Whitey's righthand man, claims that Whitey is still dangerous in jail at the age of 82: "He was a hard guy, tough as nails. A stone-cold killer. I know he’s 82 now, but still, he’s in great shape, mentally strong. I hear they’ve got him in protective custody to protect him from other inmates. But don’t put it past him: he might try to kill somebody himself. Put a shank in his hand, and he’d know what to do with it."

Still feral after all these years...

They say Whitey Bulger is in for it. The attorney for Debra Davis's family says, "Any plea that he agrees to, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass. If he goes to trial, he gets a telephone pole shoved up the ass." Well, maybe - but what in the end can they do to him? They can give him life, but - face it - he's 82. What kind of punishment is that? Prison would just be Whitey's own version of assisted living. The Bay State doesn't currently have the death penalty, but maybe they'll reinstate it just for him. God knows they should.

(As a sidenote, read some of the comments underneath the article. One commenter conflates "whitey" with white people in general, and disses both. Another taunts Whitey about how his "bung hole" will be used (or abused) in the joint. Still another pooh-poohs Whitey's dominance in South Boston, claiming most residents wouldn't have known him if he had walked past them on the street.)

Whitey’s Payback (Daily Beast)
Judge rules government liable for slayings by Bulger, Flemmi (Boston Globe)

The Corner Where The Gun Shop Stood

In my hometown, for as long as I can remember, there was a little strip mall-type place where the main road that led down from Route 2 crossed over the railroad tracks of the Boston & Maine. On the corner of this cluster of shops was a drug store or convenience store or some such thing, and the local hoods used to hang out there all the time. One day they harassed a girl who entered that store, and some young man about nineteen or twenty stepped in to defend her from them. They stabbed to death this young Galahad with a switchblade. I was only five years old then, and I didn't read the papers much, but I heard all about it. At least one of the hoods got sent to Walpole for the crime, and it was decades before there was another murder in my hometown. But for several months after that incident, whenever my granddad was taking me and my little sister on a walk and we passed that corner, he pointed out that shop, reminded us of what had happened there, and grimly shook his head. When I got to be teenaged myself, and was still living in the neighborhood, I always thought of that place as The Murder Corner.

Sometime during my teenage years, I noticed another shop in that vicinity. It was a gun shop. You could barely see inside the place, and it would be grated up after dark, but the sign on the outside let you know in no uncertain terms what merchandise was sold therein. It was the only gun shop I knew about - and I mean anywhere in that part of Greater Boston. And it stood almost on the same spot as The Murder Corner. I used to wonder whether that shop had existed when the murder took place, and was the honey-pot of weaponry around which those violent young hoods were hovering like flies. If it had not existed then, but had been opened later, why had it been opened so near that corner? Had the gun shop owners thought that it was a fitting place to sell "deterrents to crime" because of its history of violence? Or had that violence itself pervaded the soul of the place and turned it into a magnet for the sinister presence of firearms? Last time I drove past that corner, a few years ago, the Boston & Maine was long gone but that gun shop still existed. Most of the people who lived in that neighborhood are dead, or have long since grown up and moved away, and I don't think anyone around there remembers it as The Murder Corner, but in my eyes it still is.

Big Dig Contractor Murdered By David Caruso Lookalike

When concrete company president and Big Dig contractor Michael Zammitti was murdered in Wakefield, Mass. in March 2006, many assumed it was a mob hit. The Big Dig, once the largest construction project on planet Earth, was notoriously corrupt. Plus there was that Italian connection. Plus yet again, there was the sheer cold-bloodedness of the murder, which also took the life of a witness, Zammitti's part-time employee, Chester Roberts, who was shot in the back while apparently attempting to escape.

Further investigation revealed that the Mafia was not involved at all. The murder instead demonstrated one of the unexpected hazards of owning a vacation home. Michael Zammitti and his family had a sumptuous getaway in Freedom, New Hampshire, near the shores of Ossipee Lake. One of his neighbors was the affable handyman, Sean Fitzpatrick. The whole family got to know him during those leisurely summer days, the Zammitti kids even calling him "Uncle Sean". Zammitti's wife liked him, too. Fitzpatrick, who by all accounts considered himself quite the swordsman, befriended Mrs. Zammitti and eventually romanced the lady. If Fitzpatrick had remained the detached Don Juan, the romance would have run its course and nobody would have been the wiser. But the fool fell in love. When Mrs. Zammitti refused to leave her husband, Fitzpatrick behaved almost exactly like a woman scorned. Or at least like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. He drove 100 miles down to Wakefield with a 16-gauge shotgun, entered Zammitti's place of business and shot him in the head while he sat at his desk. Poor Chester Roberts was mere collateral damage.

Fitzpatrick's trial made national news, as love-triangle-related murders occasionally do (re: the Oxygen channel's Snapped). Fitzpatrick got life, twice over. Here's an object lesson for all you would-be alpha males out there. If you can't keep it in your pants, at least keep your heart buttoned up.

(Odd factoid: One of the witnesses for the prosecution was a retired political cartoonist.)

N.H. man convicted of murder in Wakefield love triangle case (Boston Globe)
Guilty Verdict in Massachusetts Double Homicide Trial (Boston Criminal Attorney Blog)
Trial To Begin in Love Triangle Double Murder (ABC News)
Family Business (MSNBC)
Neighbor recalls conversation with murder suspect (The Conway Daily Sun)

I Was A Teenaged Courtroom Monitor

Back when I was in college, I spent my winter break as a courtroom monitor for the American Friends Service Committee. This was when I wanted to become a lawyer, before I realized I was too much of a Silent Bob type ever to banter with the best of them in a law school class like those dudes in Paper Chase. A guy I knew from the Debate Club (where my silence was most conspicuous) and I signed up to monitor courtrooms for the Quakers to make sure that no legal rights were being violated. This was not to say we would have recognized such violations if we saw them. The American Friends dude who handled us – a glib, bespectacled and scruffy little guy who reminded me of the seventies-era comedian Buck Henry, and who was clearly Jewish, not a Quaker – just told us to keep notes. He would review the notes later, he assured us, and he would know if anything went wrong.

So my buddy and I did our little tour of Greater Boston courtrooms over the next few weeks. He drove. I paid for lunch. We came from the same hometown. As a matter of fact, he was my sister’s arch enemy back in high school, due to his playfully sarcastic demeanor. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed hanging out with my sister’s arch enemy.

I remember only four courtrooms. There was one in Somerville, just off McGrath Highway, which had a red brick façade with plain white columns like a pretentious funeral home or one of those forbiddingly formal restaurants that do most of their business as function rooms for wedding receptions and whatnot. The likeness fit, as appearing in court seemed just about as momentous as getting married or dying. It was even a rite of passage for some of us. The judge there was some old Irish dude whose eyes seemed to twinkle as the bailiff went, “Oyez! Oyez!” Of the few cases on the docket that morning, more than half were no-shows.

Then there was the wood-paneled courtroom in Brookline, with its short-haired lady judge. The courtroom was nearly as well-accoutered as a law office, and the cases discussed therein were just about as dull. Civil stuff, mostly. Rich guys quibbling over easements and an angry divorcee who apparently wanted to divorce herself from her own divorce lawyer. You get the picture.

The courtrooms in Boston were much grittier and more indelible. The downtown Boston courtroom had the light-colored interior of a colonial church and its docket veritably twitched with an assortment of hookers and other losers. The judge was a youngish guy who resembled Kelsey Grammer, except with gold-framed glasses and without the tooty-fruity baritone. The most memorable case that day was a probable cause hearing for a murder trial. A black inner-city dude was accused of shooting some white guy when the two crossed paths in a Boston park. The black dude claimed self-defense, even though the white dude had not been armed. He claimed, in fact, that the white dude had attacked him with his bare hands, and the black dude had no choice but to shoot him. In retrospect, this was not so long past the Boston busing crisis when black people were persona non grata in certain parts of the city, so maybe the black dude’s case would've had some merit had the white dude not been just some guy in an overcoat on his way home from work.

The freakiest courtroom of all was the one in South Boston. This supposed palace of justice was a dimly lit, puke-green-painted attic on the top floor of a hundred-year-old building on Broadway, and the case du jour was another probable cause hearing. A dapper-looking dark-haired guy – as natty as a mid-century London spiv with his blond wife sitting next to him - had allegedly murdered his boyfriend, a transvestite with undescended testicles. I did not make that up. That detail actually was mentioned, although pursuant to what I do not know.

I was not impressed with the sausage machine of the legal process during those few dreary weeks. When it was not boring, it was depressing, and when it was not depressing, it was simply inaudible. The professionalism of the attorneys and the judges was a subtle and persistent thing, like a squirrel gnawing on an acorn. Being in a courtroom ultimately reminded me of being in a hospital. In both places there is always something dramatic happening for somebody, but watching that drama unfold was, at least for this disinterested observer, like watching a tree grow.

The Case Of The Meth-Addled Spine Surgeon

Fast on the heels of Dr. Richard Sharpe comes the equally strange case of Dr. David Arndt. Although Dr. Arndt has not yet murdered anyone, he may be even scarier than Dr. Sharpe. For one thing, he is (or was) a surgeon - a profession bound to bring out the willies in the best of us. Think of the Jeremy Irons character (or characters, actually, since they were twins) in Dead Ringers. Ee-uuuwww... Not to mention all those horrifying healers of B movie infamy, always re-attaching severed heads to the wrong bodies or keeping them alive all by their lonesome. Frankenstein, too, don't forget. Ditto The Reanimators.

In the summer of 2002, Dr. Arndt made news by skipping out on a patient in the middle of an operation - a spine operation, mind you - to cash a check. He returned 35 minutes later, and eventually finished the operation, but the damage to both the patient and his reputation had been done. He was quickly suspended from Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass. Shortly afterward, his medical license was suspended and the tale of his surgical siesta went viral. Law suits followed. To be fair, spine operations can often take 8 to 10 hours to perform, even as long as 18 hours in some cases. Such work must require incredible stamina, both mental and physical, but surely there are limits. Surgeons are known to excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, for instance - and no one gets upset about that. To cash a check though... That almost makes the dude seem like a caricature of the greedy medico.

And that's not all. Less than a month after the check-cashing incident, Arndt was charged "with four counts of statutory child rape and one count each of indecent assault and battery, drugging a person for sexual intercourse, contributing to the delinquency of a child, and possession of the drugs ketamine hydrochloride ('Special K') and methamphetamine." It turns out he had picked up a couple of teenaged boys - aged 14 and 15 - in Cambridge's Central Square and held a kind of drugs-and-sex party in his car. He later gave the kids his cell phone number, which gave the coppers the tool they needed to entrap the perv.

And that's not all either. A year later, Arndt "was arrested on August 8 [2003] and charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute." Apparently, he had rented a room in a South End hotel and had ordered a package sent to him there under the alias "Frank Castro" via Federal Express. Unfortunately for him, the postal authorities found the package "suspicious" and obtained a warrant to open it. It contained "a large, pink penis-shaped pinata" which itself contained two pounds of meth.

As the Boston Globe says, these are stressful times for physicans, they often feel compelled to work way too hard, often turning to drugs and alcohol as a result, even - in many cases - using drugs like meth (or "speed") to help them work all those long hours. Dr. Arndt just had the misfortune of derailing himself far more luridly than the average addict with an M.D.

One thing Arndt had in common with Dr. Sharpe was an unconventional and rather flamboyant sexuality. While Dr. Sharpe was a cross-dresser, Dr. Arndt was a clearly out-of-control homosexual. In addition to picking up underaged boys for sex, he had also made unwelcome passes at male orderlies and nurses, and had even committed assault on one of his boyfriends. Had he been heterosexual, his behavior could have been equally bad, but it would not have contributed quite as much to his notoriety.

Dr. Arndt definitely falls in that category of Boston area bad guys whose criminality represents the flip side of brilliance. The son of a prominent Harvard Medical School professor and extremely bright in his own right, Arndt was almost hard-wired to follow a medical career. In fact, he came to medicine relatively late and via a winding path. Born in 1960, he graduated high school during the still hippy-dippy 1970's and made his way west to San Francisco, where he attended a now-defunct "alternative college", counseled the homeless and discovered his sexuality. Eventually his medical destiny drew him back to Boston, but not after he had evolved into a full-blown non-conformist. This extreme non-conformity, coupled with his intellectual arrogance, made a serious conflict with society's norms almost inevitable.

As of February 2010, Arndt was still in federal prison, serving out a 10 year sentence. He claims to have found God (but not Jesus), as "Arndt is now an ultra-Orthodox Jew who keeps kosher, wears a beard, keeps his head covered, works to follow hundreds of commandments governing all aspects of life, and spends the bulk of the day in prayer or studying ancient Jewish texts." Well, whatever it takes to keep him out of trouble.

What Went Wrong? (Boston Globe)
For a fallen surgeon, a higher power (Boston Globe)